Digital identity is the data that uniquely describes a person or a thing and contains information about the subject's relationships within the digital world, commonly referred to as cyberspace, World Wide Web (WWW) or Internet. A critical problem is knowing the true identity with whom one is interacting either within electronic messaging, Internet accessible content, or transaction. Currently there are no ways to precisely determine the identity of a person in digital space. Even though there are identity attributes associated to a person's digital identity, these attributes or even identities can be changed, masked or dumped and new ones created. Despite the fact that there are many authentication systems and digital identifiers that try to address these problems, there is still a need for a unified and verified identification system. Further, there are still the needs for respecting the privacy of individuals, maintaining security of the elements of a digital identity and associating.
With the advent of widespread electronic devices, the landscape for the identity (ID) documents industry has been rapidly changing with increasingly sophisticated security measures, increased electronic processing, global wireless network connectivity, and continuously expanding machine readable capabilities globally. These have evolved in order to counter the increasingly sophisticated counterfeiting and piracy methodologies that exploit the very same advances in technology and infrastructure. At the same time user expectations from ubiquitous portable electronic devices, global networks, etc. is for simplified security processes and streamlined authentication of an ID document, the user, or a transaction by the user.
Security features of ID documents currently in use globally include visual security features, machine-readable security features, and embedded passive or active electronic circuits. Visual Security Features provide easy visual control of ID documents and make them more resistant to counterfeiting and tampering through attempts at both physical and data changes. Machine-readable Security Features traditionally include magnetic stripes, 1D and 2D barcodes, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)/Optically Machine Readable (OMR) content in printed areas or Machine Readable Zones (MRZs). More advanced ID documents may also include contact and contactless interfaces microchips including RFID and smart cards. Such Machine-readable Security Features have varying memory capacity and typically replicate digitally the document data with additional unique identifiers and, in the case of microchips with sufficient data storage capabilities, additional biometric identification data for holder authentication may be included.
However, many if not all of these security measures are bypassed, eliminated, or reduced in their efficacy when the ID document is also provided in an electronic format upon a user's portable electronic device. Such a transitioning of traditional physical ID documents to their electronic “virtual” counterparts is anticipated to follow the current transitioning of user's financial credentials into the virtual world allowing users to pay for services and/or goods within retail environments by direct wireless communications between their portable electronic device and the point of sale terminal. However, the tampering of ID documents which would be visible upon the physical ID document can be rendered invisible within the electronic ID document with relative ease and with a variety of online and/or downloadable graphics editing tools etc. Accordingly, the requirement exists to provide third parties with the ability to verify the electronic version of an ID document being presented to them as being valid and untampered.
Accordingly, the inventors address these issues through the provisioning of electronic ID documents which when presented to a third party are associated with provisioning of data to the third party that allows them to verify the presented electronic ID document. Further, the inventors by linking the electronic ID document to its physical ID document counterpart or tying the electronic ID document to the physical individual provide authenticable electronic ID documents.
Other aspects and features of the present invention will become apparent to those ordinarily skilled in the art upon review of the following description of specific embodiments of the invention in conjunction with the accompanying figures.